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welcome everyone to the high performance legal entrepreneur podcast i'm your host adam markfield president and founder of prevail legal marketing and today i have steve fretson joining me steve is president of frets in inc and the podcast host of be that lawyer steve thanks for joining us thanks adam thanks for having me let's um let's just get started by you giving us a little bit of background on how you got started working with attorneys in general where'd that journey start for you yeah so the easiest way to explain it is to let everyone know right off the bat i'm not an attorney i was pulled into the industry kicking and screaming in 2008 with the recession and what i've been doing before that i've been a sales guy since i was 16 selling shoes and sort of went to college just to get a degree and uh and then i just ended up getting back into sales and that's what i did for the majority of my early part of my career and in 2004 set up a shop uh believe it or not called sales results inc all about helping entrepreneurs improve sales and this came about after working with a coach myself and getting a tremendous amount of feedback and and identifications of gaps and problems and challenges that i didn't even know i had i thought i was the bee's knees and he was able to identify a bunch of things that i was doing very inefficiently and i just fell in love with coaching i fell in love with with sales coaching in particular by the way as an aside years ago i took a personality like career test and it showed the two things that i should do with my life if i could pick if like based on my personality and my skill sets was was um teaching or sales and now i'm teaching sales so there you go that helps explain it but in in 2004 set up my shop mainly helping entrepreneurs worked in about worked in over 50 different industries and in 2008 when the recession hit i started getting calls from lawyers many of my entrepreneur clients had been talking about how wonderful the program was and the coaching experience they had with me and i started working with a lawyer then two then three then a firm then another and it really within a couple years blew out and i realized about 80 percent of my total client base was lawyers and law firms so i just decided to push my chips in they absolutely hated my name sales results inc so i changed it to frets and inc because essentially i am the business anyway so that's what's gone on and then um that's what i've been doing is really helping lawyers figure out how to do what i call sales free selling which is not sales it's actually teaching them how to run meetings and how to prospect and get um business built without ever feeling salesy so it really works well within the mindset of a lawyer and and their interest in never really feeling like a salesperson so it's really been a great synergistic and harmonious type of relationship i've had in the legal community now for i don't know 14 years or so that's amazing um so what does feeling salesy mean like what does an attorney mean when they say that so i think it's it's when you i mean they even have a name for it they call it i'm going on a pitch meeting they're pitching business that's what they call it in the legal industry and that's essentially going into a meeting to share why you're smarter better faster stronger than other lawyers and how you can help solve legal challenges maybe better than anybody else and the problem with that is that many lawyers feel that whether it's networking and passing out cards or it's meeting with people and making a pitch it's a lot about convincing it's a lot about just trying to lock up the business get that business brought in which means that you're selling yourself and you're selling your firm and that just for a lot of attorneys doesn't feel great it feels like you're just you're not at your best self and so the concept of sales free selling which i've been teaching now for around 20 years is is is all about the idea that you could go out build relationships build trust ask great questions be a consultant and and identify needs and and then after you've done all that and qualified that someone's a good fit then you might be in a position to you know help solve problems or help you know present solutions but it's really more walking a buyer through a buying decision to see if there's a fit versus trying to convince or pitch someone to do bit to do work with you um so can you maybe i i love what you're saying it makes sense but what i what i'd be curious about is can you like give two examples like almost like i don't like role play but i mean like when someone's doing it wrong quote unquote you know they're salesy and then when someone's kind of doing it right because i'm sitting here and i'm thinking about myself selling right so um what are the things that people say that turn people off and or make them salesy and then how does that compare to something that you know you teach and sounds better i mean i can certainly give examples but i will i will share with you something that i i had a big aha moment on years ago and my clients when they hear me present this they they have the same moment of of oh my god that is exactly what's happening so i'll tell you about two models and how they don't work well together and this this example i think will cover where you want to go so there is a seller's model all right and this is we can take a lawyer let's say a lawyer is uh selling an estate planning okay meets with a husband and wife in uh in a conference room or a home or whatever and that so now they have a prospect they get the prospect in front of the lawyer the lawyer pitches look you know i'm here to talk about estate planning um and here's what here's what we do to help people with estate plans here's i've got a bunch of questions to ask you and they get all that information they present the solution of an estate plan and what an estate plan does and they talk about the price and the price for that is 3 500 okay then the the buyer is going to have objections the seller the lawyer in this case will handle those objections well the reason it's 3 500 is because i'm going to be doing this kind of work and the option the idea of the seller is to close the business to lock up the business okay so that's the seller model to get to pitch to close before the ether wears off all right now here's the interesting thing if we take off our sale sellers hats and you have a seller hat i have a seller hat we put on our buyer hats right adam you buy stuff don't you you go out and buy things right plenty of things yep plenty of things i mean people have been buying for the last two years straight with with the reset with the the pandemic and think about how we buy okay so let's say i walk into a department store and i'm looking for a gift from my wife for her birthday and a salesperson approaches me and says sir may i help you and i would put up my hands which you can't see but i'm putting up my hands like as a wall and i say just looking now is that true am i just looking i'm not just looking i'm there for a reason okay but i don't want to be approached by a salesperson i don't want to be sold something i'm i've been i've been beat up before by sales people so i have a built-in mechanism to to to hold them at bay and what am i really looking for as a buyer so let's take it to the next level let's say you're buying an addition on your home a kitchen or high-level legal services the job of the buyer is to get information and price right isn't that what you search for when you're looking for a car when you're looking to get a new kitchen you want to get three different options you want to get all that information price we are an information generation that's what we do and it's been going on and the internet has been a huge build up to that and then what we do once we get that information is we have power the power to compare the power to negotiate the power to maybe not do anything maybe the power to just say i'll think about it i'll get back to you and then what do we as buyers do when we decide that we're not going to do something or when we're going to go with someone else we just disappear right so there's a seller model that's all about getting to the close and there's a buyer model that's all about information and price and then taking our sweet time to make decisions because we don't want to be pushed into something and the problem is is that they're very competitive they're very competitive the seller's there to sell the buyers there to buy and they're not necessarily working in each other's best interests do you see where i'm going with this so what what i'm suggesting and working on with attorneys and really this could be in any industry is to not use the seller model of pitching anymore and not to allow buyers to use the buying model because it actually isn't in their best interest to just collect data and information what they really should go for is the sales-free selling model that i teach which is a buyer is getting walked through a buying decision not being sold but being asked questions to identify needs to identify gaps to identify where the challenges are and then once that's been identified then to see if there's a good fit to see if there's a reason to collaborate so let's take you for example i'm a law firm that is in getting enough lead generation okay i want as the buyer i want to be understood i want to be listened to i want to be walked through a decision to see if adam's pay-per-click program is the right for me versus the one i did before that was a train wreck okay and that's a much better model than you selling me services are you selling me pay-per-click or trying to squeeze me into you know a round peg through a square hole all right so that's really what i'm trying to explain to everybody that the the seller model doesn't work the buyer model doesn't work they're they're not really cohesive and we need to look at a different model and it's amazing what happens when my clients go through my program and they start being a better listener questioner on more understanding more empathetic it ends up not they end up not really having to sell anything at all it ends up just being like this is such a great fit i feel understood and how do we move forward and that's really a better experience for everybody yeah so just to kind of recap that to make sure i understand the buyer model is going through acquiring information not really engaging just like doing all the research right that's the person that says no i don't need help but really they're clearly looking for something and the seller model is someone trying to push someone into a sale um you know just talking about themselves you know not really digging to the buyer and so you're talking about sort of bridging that gap which is asking questions to to help the buyer go through their process but not just leave them on their own where they're not you know it's hard to find the information on your own and make decisions based on that right is that a fair kind of recap of what you're saying i'll just give you a quick example from my life my i was looking for a new car and uh test drove an audi my wife was pregnant at the time this is going back a number of years and the salesman said see how fast you can take this on-ramp he thought that i was into speed that i was into the the performance performance of the car which by the way if my wife wasn't there yeah i would have i would have taken it a little further my wife freaked out she didn't like that at all what did what should the salesman have been doing the salesman should have been asking questions the salesman should have identified that my wife's pregnant maybe her hot buttons were different than mine maybe her hot buttons were about safety for the baby and that car would have been would have not had been sold it would have been bought because he would have he would have brought us into what matters to us and what matters to my wife which by the way was more important in this case and that never happened okay so it's it's so much more about understanding and and figuring out a way to partner to solve problems versus me trying to just guess what your problems are and just start throwing out solutions the the other mantra i'll share with you that really pulls this all together adam and people that have heard me present before know this through and through think about this prescription before diagnosis is malpractice so that's the equivalency of me going into a doctor's office saying my arm hurts and the doctor says let's cut it off is there a better way to handle that yeah it's called diagnosis it's called asking questions it's called x-ray it's called mri right so a doctor is going to be sued for malpractice if a if he doesn't do good diagnosis and same thing in in in selling legal services we don't want to have malpractice because we're prescribing too soon we're prescribing before we diagnose that is a great parallel that's a great parallel now i've been lightly involved in sales training like sandler and they say you know get conditional closes and it's it's all of that type of thing uh what what's your take on that type of sales training versus yours is it is it similar in some ways or is it different i mean i feel i i feel sad salesy in the sandler method because it's like you're always you're asking questions that are so uncommon you're just trying to take them down the path and it feels awkward to me but admittedly i did not get very deep into it but i just know a bit about it so yeah i mean it's it's i think sandler is very good for sales people to unwrap the way that they've been doing it maybe impr improperly um i can't speak you know i i can tell you is that i try to pull from sandler i try to pull from all the top uh process driven uh programs so that i can put something together that makes sense for lawyers because lawyers are a unique group they they they need to be treated in a different way than you know an insurance salesman or other types of people selling services and obviously one thing that i've been able to do over doing this you know 14 years or longer has been to craft a program specifically for lawyers that really hits the mark as far as how they want to feel and how they want to sell and then on top of that i have to customize some elements of it because one lawyer is an introvert ip intellectual property attorney who's a scientist and i've got someone else who's an extrovert who is running around like a chicken with its head cut off and so i've got to be flexible in the prod the process i teach isn't that flexible i think it's all a series of steps that everyone follows but the language and the way that it's approached will vary from client to client lawyer to lawyer and so i i think that um if it's something that's like i have a client i talked to this morning who is very uncomfortable with something and it was just a matter of taking an extra couple minutes to customize the language to something that he can he can wrap his hands around and i'll give you a quick example that might that might illustrate this for some lawyers asking a client for a referral right and we know that's the heart of how we get business right if you can take a happy client and get another client from that happy client that's the easiest and low-hangus lowest hanging fruit that exists but lawyers are afraid to make the ask some lawyers can just say look you know we've been working together a long time you've been very happy with the work that i've done and i know there's other people that i could help the way i've helped you can we talk about a few of those and that's making the ask but someone that is comfortable with that is gonna handle it very similarly however what if you're an introvert what if you're very uncomfortable with what i just said you're listening to this right now saying i would never say that that's super uncomfortable so i've customized a variety of options in different language variants to help people that are uncomfortable and sometimes admitting you're uncomfortable is a great way to get buy-in from the other person so i teach something very simple psychologically simple it's called okay not okay so adam if i noticed on on looking at you on online that you seem like you're not well like you're you're sweating and you've got a fever and i would say adam are you okay you know is there anything i can do for you want me to you know send you some some tea or something like that right we take care of people that are not okay that's what good people do so in this instance let's say i have an introverted attorney that is very uncomfortable making and ask for an introduction to another gc for example general counsel and so the language they would use is you know adam um i've been meaning to ask you something but if i'm being honest terribly uncomfortable with what i'm about to ask you but i'm pushing myself because i care about my business and i care about um you know helping people and i think you know you know a lot of people that other general counsels that you've worked with that i might be a great fit for you you know you've told me on a number of occasions how good i am but again i don't want to overstep any boundaries with our relationship adam but is that something you'd be open to talking about what the heck are you gonna say to me no i'm not interested in that you're going to come to my rescue because you like me and because you know i'm good and because my not okayness needs to be met with you helping to make me okay so if there's some psychology there it's very simple i'm no therapist although i play one on tv working with lawyers but that's a simple fix for lawyers that and then of course the lawyers that use that language they try it out once or twice and they come back and they go oh my god you would not believe how many referrals i just got from my general counsel client the guy the guy wants to introduce me to 10 people i don't even have the capacity for that it's all because the language needed to be adapted to that individual yeah and i i sort of feel like the buzzword these days for that is like vulnerability right like you're exposing yourself and saying you know i'm a human this makes me uncomfortable i like i i want to grow my business we've had a good relationship you know would you be willing to help you know and you're just like asking for help in a more vulnerable way than saying hey do you know someone that might be able to use my services you're still asking for help then but it's like less a little bit more shielded a little bit more important and i don't think it shows weakness it shows maybe vulnerability but what it shows is it demonstrates that i'm being sensitive to the relationship and i'm being sensitive to who i am as a person and in my comfort level with what i'm doing however i still need to do it and i'm hoping you can help me and by the way if the person says go screw yourself or they say not interested or what then you never should have made the ask in the first place because you didn't really have the relationship that you thought it was either transactional or they really don't like you right and in that case you you know you're not aware an aware individual at all so this would be for your a or b clients that really have told you on a number of occasions how terrific you are and they like you and the relationship is you know star high star rating um and again common sense well i mean that's a really good point i mean if you're uncomfortable asking someone for a referral it could either be because you're uncomfortable with the process or because you're not certain about the relationship and you're not exactly sure if they want to give you a referral yeah so it's important to identify which of those it is because if you get through the process but the relationship isn't very strong it's gonna it's not gonna go so well and it's probably gonna damage the relationship further because it's you're i don't know it's it just shows lack of awareness like you said and is uncomfortable yeah and again if you don't feel that the relationship is there well here's a aha moment for you focus on that build the social component ask them how you can help their business um you know give them referrals figure out are they short on staff and maybe you know somebody that would be a great fit for their company i mean there's all kinds of ways to add value and that's what needs to happen uh prior to you know in addition to just doing great work or in addition or prior to making an ask like that where the expectation is they're going to step up what do you what do you see over the last 14 years as the mindset that's the most limiting for attorneys because a lot of i mean you know growth is is almost all mindset right um what are the mindsets that you see that that locked attorneys down and what does they have to transition into to really start growing i mean most attorneys right now are busier than they've ever been i mean i've even had some lawyers say look i i'd love to do your program but i can't even handle more business if i brought it in and that's limiting in the sense that is that going to be forever is that the way things are gonna are gonna stand now for the next five or ten years you know business development is something that is a mindset that you either have you don't have or you're looking to develop and if you think that you've got enough business today that doesn't necessarily mean the business is there tomorrow and all the smart lawyers that that know that um you know they're not they're not taking the same risks as someone who uh even an associate at a firm is thinking i've got work i have to do for everybody where am i going to do business development well you're not going to do business development because you're going to be so busy doing everyone else's work and working for everyone else's clients you're never going to build your own and what's the downside of that well there's a lot of downsides to not having your own clients right how you run your day how you run your life how you know and again things might be okay right now but the reality is that firms are getting gobbled up at a record rate um non-lawyer law firms are just starting out in arizona and utah that's going to be a thing and you're going to be competing against you know deloitte you're going to be competing against google i mean do you think google might give their law firm a good rating or a good you know good placement on google who knows so there's just a lot of elements there could be another recession i mean there's all kinds of stuff going on right now so i think just preparing for the future and thinking about business development as one of the key and core fundamental skills that need to be developed in addition to being a great lawyer yeah yeah and i i um i totally agree with that um so the strategies that you're seeing working in the um do you also talk do you also work with attorneys on just business development in general outside of the close about how to bring in more clients and can you talk about that a little bit if you do yeah it's it's really um it's really like a story every good story has a beginning a middle and an end and if you miss one of those pieces it's not a great story i mean my wife walks in when i'm watching a show and there's you know 10 minutes left and then she wants to know everything about what's going on and i just want to put my head through a window okay because i just sat through 50 minutes of this and then she missed it so the beginning of the story is is attorneys need to write a plan of how they're going to go to market they're going to social media it could be pay-per-click it could be you know their website it could be business development like networking leveraging clients cross marketing there's all different ways to go to market and to get business and i always recommend going after the low-hanging fruit like why are you networking and meeting strangers when you have 250 clients that you haven't been contacting right i mean that there's things that that might be right in front of you uh that you need to find but it all starts at with with a planning and understanding how you should be spending your time and i absolutely work on that that's you know paramount the second piece is all right now you've generated you know business or generated opportunities for business now you need sales free selling how are you walking those buyers through a buying decision to get to the close to compete against you know if you're an ip firm and you've got uh someone looking to meet with you and three other firms how are you gonna win that business okay how are you gonna come across different and authentic and better and and do it without selling and then the third piece is how do you implement clients retain clients and then stay viable in the market from a branding perspective right how do you stay top of mind that could be a newsletter that could be social media that could be you know how you how you touch base with them on an ongoing basis and keep track of it in an organized way versus oh i think i need to call that client i haven't talked to him in a year well yeah that's a year you haven't been in front of someone that you should have been in front of every month because they represent a hundred thousand dollars a year in business to you or had in the past okay so it really is a bunch of different elements um that are important if it's something that i don't do like there's somebody coming to me for something like what you do adam i don't do it well then i have you and i've got other people in other areas that i can refer i don't physically put together a newsletter but if somebody needs one i've got five or ten different resources that i could hand them to get that knocked out yeah you know and on the on the fulfillment and process side um you know what do you see it you know in that realm you know they've done the marketing they've gotten the leads in they've done the sales and you know operations and processes are a real challenge for businesses in general you know attorneys included so where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth just internally with the business and some of the biggest mistakes that you know any any firm makes smaller or larger i mean not really getting into operations but to talk about it from a business development perspective the the two or three biggest mistakes or missteps that i see and again when i evaluate an attorney in some cases i have like a page of notes of things or that where i've identified gaps things that just are they're not doing to the degree and they might have a million or two million dollar book i've had people with a 10 million dollar book and i identified tons of gaps because they're missing some things that are right in front of them it's like a pile of money sitting on a table and they're just walking around it all today so i would say the top two are how do you leverage ex past and existing clients for additional business so that could be cross marketing if you're at a full service firm to be able to all right i'm doing their uh litigation but we're not doing their m a we're not doing their real estate we're not doing the other areas that surround that client because it's a mid-market international client and there's all kinds of legal needs and we're only handling one piece of it and when in fact i could be managing the whole kit and caboodle okay so that's one piece is the cross marketing the other is again lack of effort or process to identify that general counsel ceo that decision maker client who they know and walking them through who they can introduce you to so that you can get that other business without really working very hard right now 25 percent of general counsels are ready to move at any given time so that's a report that came out uh that was a survey report done uh interviewing general counsels all over the world that 25 of them are saying yeah if i'm if yeah i'm ready to go i'm ready to leave i'm ready to move law firms and lawyers aren't even thinking about that they're not they're probably they've got their they've got counsel if they need me they'll call well that lack of proactivity is a huge misstep because we're just waiting for the phone to ring and it's not the good old days of the 80s 90s 2000s you know people just aren't picking up phones anymore you need to be put in front of them through a trusted advisor a trusted client in order to get a seat at the table and have that opportunity to pull that business in it's there so i think those are probably the top two that i see and then just solos for example just not putting that plan together to identify how they should be spending their time so they're just doing shotgun they're they're doing whatever is the soup of the day as opposed to having a targeted plan and execution uh that's gonna really drive that traction yeah you know if you don't have some sort of a guide on what you're doing it's it's just really hard to focus your time throughout the day because you just get distracted every little tactic that comes your way shiny object you start kind of chasing for a little bit and this is this is actually one of my biggest struggles is like you know staying true to the path that i'll create paths all the time i'll create frameworks but then like staying in it it's hard that's a hard thing to do there's a book there's a book by mike kim sitting right here on my desk called you are the brand and there's a ton of great takeaways in that book and shout out to mike kim the one that really resonated with me is he made a decision like to make to do one thing really well so this is the year of the podcast this is the year of the book the year of linkedin and just spend a year focusing on one thing not doing a hundred things one thing really now that doesn't mean you can't do a couple other things on the side but i've got a book coming out this year and into next year called legal business development isn't rocket science okay and it's going to be my year of the book i'm going to talk about the book i'm going to promote the book i'm going to share the book i'm going to give away the book i mean it's going to be book book book and i'm going to spend a whole year doing that and get a lot of movement just on the fact that i put a tremendous amount of time into a really robust book that covers a lot of ground for lawyers um this year 2021 was the year of the podcast my podcast has grown significantly and i've invested a ton of time and energy and everything building up my audience and building up uh you know getting just making sure that that it's front and center and it's been great so that that type of focus i think produces better results than doing trying to do everything around every you know around every idea that pops into your head yeah i really like that having an annual theme and a year is a long time but it's also not forever right so you can do really big things in a year and have massive momentum in just that amount of time yeah all right um just one last question before we wrap up i i'm just curious to hear what do you feel like is happening in the legal field or i don't want to say like what's the future of the legal field but are you seeing transitions take place with all the attorneys you're coaching um anything you might predict over the next couple years or five years anything like that well there's there's things going on in the news every day that i try to stay on top of and it's mostly related to um the the idea that and again in some states uh non-non-lawyer-run law firms is a thing so is going to be bringing out a huge team of lawyers to compete against law firms and they've got technology on their side they've got a robust platform and a lot of the lawyers who are running the i will call it the good old boy style of running a law firm which is not running it like a business they're lacking technology they're lacking culture they're lacking infrastructure unless they're looking to retire in the next five years and just kind of move on they're going to find themselves in a bit of a pickle between competition that's going to be flooding into the market technology that continues to advance and the competition that exists right now and in the sharpening of pencils by general counsels and ceos who want the best legal representation and they don't necessarily want to pay the most money for it and so i think that we've got to start really getting serious about the technology the infrastructure the culture and the business development marketing the stuff that you and i do every day adam because that's really the future of law and the people that are that are behind on it now and that aren't seeing the future they're going to be left behind you're either in the conversation or you're out of the conversation and unfortunately you know legal has been always very slow to change and adapt and that's going to end up hurting some people in the next three to five years pretty pretty seriously yeah well you know we're in arizona and the the non-attorney law firm um thing kicked off earlier this year and it's it's really interesting that you bring up hiring attorneys and you know i do wonder how that's going to evolve all of these platforms that are lead generators for attorneys um you know how does that market shift as the landscape of owning a law firm changes you know and i didn't realize that utah was going that way is that what you said that utah thing oh so um that will be really interesting to see how that changes so now adam you've got a second business you get called by a lawyer he wants to partner with you you know you could generate x number of leads in a in a week or a month or whatever and now you're a partner in a firm that's driving huge revenues and guess what you're an equity partner in that firm and that's a lot of marketing people are figuring out hey i can make a ton of money do i'm doing i'm making money doing this for other people but if i did this for myself with a law firm scott i mean i could be hired by a law firm or work where debt equity is a law i'm not a lawyer but you know you want to compete against me for business and business development i consider myself to be a pretty sharp guy pretty good at doing business right um so i think that that we need to and people in illinois i'm here in chicago oh that would never happen in illinois okay well we'll see we'll see about that you know who knows we're evolving things are evolving all the time all right steve well thanks so much for joining us today um where do people find you and um uh you also use the podcast be that lawyer so you can find you there but where's your website and the best place to get in contact with you yeah website is fredson.com it's f-r-e-t-z-i-n-dot-com you can type my name into google to steve fretson um and then linkedin is also a great way i've got a big following on linkedin and constantly posting content and trying to be valuable there are lawyers out there that are are looking for help with business development i'm happy to have that conversation and for those who have no interest in that at all leverage my content i've got three books now four coming out i've got videos on my youtube channel and on my website i've got articles i've been writing for the chicago daily law bulletin for six years so if you never want to talk to a coach that's fine use my content and try to get smarter better faster as it relates to how you build your book and stay relevant and that's how i try to be valuable to the industry perfect all right thank you again steve for joining us and uh to everyone else we'll see you in the next episode